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Arbor Networks has compiled traffic data from 65 ISPs in Europe and North America, all of which showed an intriguing difference in Internet usage patterns. When time zone differences are accounted for, North American Internet traffic peaks at 11pm and drops off consistently all night; European traffic peaks at 7pm and plummets soon after. Intriguing questions lie hidden within that one data point. Perhaps, as some of Arbor's customers speculated, "Europeans use the Internet less at night, have better social interactions, eat better food, and generally live better lives."

The data certainly suggests that Europeans tend not to use the Internet for evening reading/entertainment/guild raids, while Americans are increasingly using it to watch video and play games in the evenings. Arbor's follow-up investigation of the data showed that P2P, which might be thought somehow responsible for the surge, actually has nothing to do with it—it remains level all day, only surging upwards after midnight.

(The shape of the P2P usage curve is "highly suggestive of either persistent congestion or, more likely, evidence of widespread provider manipulation of P2P traffic rates." In other words, throttling is alive and well in North America.)

Credit: Arbor Networks

The 11pm North American peak fits nicely with the peaks for World of Warcraft, streaming online video, and Steam, though. Video peaks at midnight EDT, and although it's hard to say for sure what's being watched, Arbor has an idea. "Predictably, traffic grows dramatically to consumer sites like Google’s YouTube and large CDN/video providers. Also not surprisingly, we see a large jump in traffic to colo/hosting companies with adult content such as a 40% jump to ISPrime (AS23393) between 10pm and 1am EDT."

So North Americans spend their evenings playing online games, watching porn, watching online movies and TV shows, and browsing the Web. But it's not clear from the data that Europeans are all out having leisurely dinners with plenty of friends; the US-wide availability of services like Netflix On-Demand, Amazon On-Demand, and Hulu might mean that North Americans and Europeans both watch ungodly amounts of video content, with one group staring at laptop screens and the other at TV sets.

Still, it's incredible just how quickly the Internet has changed the way North Americans spend their free time, and just how addicting all that on-demand Internet content can be. Twenty years, ago, for instance, who would have published a 35,000+ word review of Snow Leopard and then displayed it to readers free of charge? These are strange and wonderful times in which we live.